DayZ

Without a doubt, it's one of my favorite games. I understand the game's development has been extremely rocky, and when it began, it was a mess. I remember when I bought the game around 2015 (I was 13), I thought it was complete shit. My friends and I got back into it over quarantine, and I realized this was the game I'd been looking for since I was a kid. I always wanted a large, open-world multiplayer zombie hardcore survival game like this, and every single one I ran into always disappointed me before, even DayZ when I first tried it.

But, and some may disagree with me, the team working on the game has done a lot, and for the past three years, it's been in a good state. It isn't perfect, and I'm giving it a 4.5 for this reason. There have been many times when a bug will ruin a run completely or get me killed, or completely fuck me over. The combat is sometimes a bit clunky as well as the behavior of the zombies. But I've had way more amazing in-game experiences that could not have been had in any other game than I've had a bug ruin something. Intense, funny, crazy, what the hell just happened? Experiences with other players. Experiences that, honestly, as dumb as It might sound, have stuck with me due to the connections you can make in-game with random people. There isn't another game that offers these experiences to me, and most other survival games fail to balance everything that makes a survival game fun for me (cough cough RUST, HURTWORLD, UNTURNED, 7 DAYS TO DIE, THE FOREST ). So I highly recommend going solo and teaming up with a random. It's where I've had the most fun, and you also get to connect with a new person (if they are nice). One time, I met a guy with the same name as me, and as we were warming up next to a fire, he told me about his job at a casino.

As long as the DayZ team continues to work hard on making the game smoother and with more options for the player, I will continue to enjoy this game for many years. I understand if you are spent on this game, and there are times when I have felt like that before, but no matter what, I always come back craving another adventure. DayZ certainly offers something special and unique.

(If playing on official servers hasn't worked out for you I recommend DayOne servers which are lightly modded with some additional items and honestly seem to have more people willing to team up.)

This is my most played game on Steam, by a large margin, and I couldn't recommend anyone to play it only because of how time consuming and addicting it can get. What you can do on this game just seems endless, yet there's way too many exploits, glitches, bugs, and DayZ's biggest problem, modders.

Bohemia refuses to acknowledge the ongoing issue for official servers, from the modding to the duping. Some of the updates have been a hit or miss as well.

What I can say though that are VERY positive about this game, are the visuals. Dated graphics, sure, but the landscapes of each map are stunning. You really feel as if you're in an end of the world scenario. Wildlife, sicknesses, infected, players, you name it. Everything is trying to kill you one way or another. Modded/community servers is DayZ's saving grace. It has basically everything you could look for.

I'm not entirely sure as to why DayZ has such a poor score on Glitchwave, but if it's about the reasons stated in the first paragraph then it is kind of deserved. As much as I love this game and it has like everything I look for in a game, I can't rate it higher than a 4.

DayZ tried and failed to capture the magic of the original Arma 2 mod. While it is forgivable to have a subpar experience on the mod, DayZ standalone didn't clean up the experience. Similar bugs from the mod and missing features make it a confusing revisit in 2020.